Sleeping Arrangements
Sleeping Arrangements is the third episode of the first season of KrisTen. Blurb After realizing that poor little Pi had nowhere to go and no one to call her family that she remembers, Lyn decides to take her home and let her stay there for a while. Convincing her parents to help out the poor girl wasn't a problem- until another robot attacks and rips up the whole backyard. They kick Pi, who they figured out is named Kristen, out on the streets to defend their home, much to Lyn's dismay. But when even more robots appear and are out for Lyn's blood, she becomes Lyn and her family's only hope. Now if only they knew where she was. In-Depth Summary The episode begins with Lyn groggily waking up behind a bush, sunlight peeking through the cracks between the leaves and branches. At first she is utterly confused, but then she realizes where she is and the whole of last night's events come rushing into her memory, which jolts her wide awake. She notices the sunrise, swears under her breath and mutters that she's way past curfew, and tries to check her phone for the time, only to realize that the screen is cracked and it's out of battery. She almost gets up and tries to make her way home, before remembering that Pi was on the ground next to her. Knowing that she can't just leave the poor girl (or whatever she was) there, she woke her up and took her with her. Cut to Lyn and Pi walking down the street up to Lyn’s place. Lyn tells her to stay outside until she calls her, and that she’ll handle things with her parents. Pi does as she is instructed, and Lyn walks inside and calls out that she’s home. Her mother sees her and practically tackles her, flooded with relief after an entire night of worrying about her baby. She asks what happened and why she stayed so far past her curfew without even calling. Lyn says that it’s a long story and she’d rather tell it when the whole family was present so she didn’t have to repeat herself (really she was trying to come up with an excuse). Her father and her sister Rose come downstairs right away, also joining in the hugfest and asking her where she was this whole time. Before she went into detail, she tells them that she found a strange girl who didn’t seem to be able to speak, and brings Pi in to show them. Her father thinks that her parents are probably as worried sick as they were about Lyn, and that they should call the police about her. But all the police phone lines seem to be busy thanks to the strange gunfights and explosions downtown that happened last night. The family agrees to house her until they can get a hold of the authorities. Then, Lyn launches into a huge story about what happened the night before. The viewers only get to hear the tail end of the story, but the gist seems to be that Lyn found Pi, and was taking her to the police when they got attacked by a bear in the woods, then got hopelessly lost, slept in a tree, then made it back to town the next day. By the end of the story, she's out of breath. Her dad doesn't seem to completely buy it, and asks her a few questions about the specifics. The more questions he asks, the more incosistant the lie becomes; this makes Lyn extremely nervous. Eventually he asks her some questions about the bear attack, and Lyn sees her chance. She starts acting like she's having a nervous breakdown, stuttering and pretending to feel lightheaded and sick to her stomach, going so far as to force tears. Her parents seem to buy it, apologize for ever doubting her. Lyn claims that she needs a minute (her excuse being to change her clothes), running upstairs. Pi, who doesn't know that she's acting, looks extremely worried about her and follows. The second that they're up in Lyn's bedroom, Lyn regains her normal composure and informs Pi that she was only acting. She picks out some clothes from her closet that look like they might fit Pi, then tells her to go undress in the bathroom across the hall. She waits outside the door while Pi goes at it, with a lot of thumping and grunting. Lyn opens the door slightly and throws the clothes in, and tells Pi to meet her back in her room. The scene cuts to Lyn adjusting the new shirt she just put on. The door creaks open and Pi walks in- and she's wearing the clothes right over her jumpsuit thing. Lyn rubs her temples and sighs, trying to keep her patience, and offers Pi some help. Lyn pushes Pi's ridiculously long hair out of the way, making a passing comment on how weird the color is. At the top of her neck she finds a magnetic zipper-like mechanism, which she uses to start to open the back. She unzips it about down a little ways but stops when something across the nape of her neck catches her eye. Lyn opens it a bit more so she can see it properly: it's a tattoo, which reads "Kristen". Lyn says it aloud, and Pi turns her head as if responding to her name being called. Both are shocked by this reaction, and they manage to establish that Pi's name is in fact Kristen. They celebrated this for a second, but stops when they realized that their stomaches were growling like mad. Kristen is extremely confused and a little scared by the noise, but Lyn just says that they should hurry up and change, and unzips the suit a little further before cutting to the next scene. Kristen is outside on the porch of the backyard. Lyn walks outside with pancakes, gives some to Kristen, and starts scarfing them down herself. Kristen just looks confused. Lyn tells her to eat it; she's still puzzled, so she just tries to mimic what Lyn is doing, putting a piece in her mouth. She is overtaken by the awesome flavor, and without thinking stuffs her mouth full of pancake. But she doesn't swallow, and soon starts making muffled shouting noises for help. Lyn, exasperated, starts to instruct her step by step on how to swallow. In the middle of her explanation, her parents come outside to check on them. (Luckily, Kristen does manage to swallow around that time.) Lyn and her parents talk for a second about how they still can't get a hold of the police. Suddenly, a loud buzzing fills the air. Lyn reacts automatically, shouting at her parents to duck and tackling them both to the ground just as a huge laser fires over their heads. Kristen jumps backwards, accidentally knocking herself over the railing and into the yard. From the sky descends a robot drone. It automatically turns its attention to Kristen, and flies right at her. Luckily, her fright triggers a transformation, and she morphs into Pulscal. The drone flies right through the hole in the alien’s ring-shaped body. The robot goes at her a few times, firing lasers, and she continues to dodge in various ways. Meanwhile, Lyn is trying to corral her terrified parents inside. It’s not working, so she just gives up and jumps the railing to help Pulscal out. Pulscal managed to thwack the robot in the head, giving her time to get some space. But it recovers, floats back up, and activates a new weapon- spinning blades coming out around its circumference. It charges at Pulscal- there’s no way she could dodge this one, so she braces herself for impact. When she does, Lyn notices that a sphere of colored air swirling in the middle of the ring. Inspired, she shouts at Pulscal for her attention, and gets it. Pulscal lets her guard down because of it and stops bracing, causing the sphere to suddenly burst forth and send out on air burst, pushing the robot back into the fence. Lyn tells her to keep doing that. The battle continues for a little while, Lyn distracting and Pulscal shooting (at one point her parents shout for her get out of there, she says she’s got it under control). Eventually, Pulscal manages to get above the drone and blasts it into the ground, making a huge crater and pounding it into a pile of scrapmetal. They celebrate their victory, but it’s short lived. As soon as they notice Lyn’s parents approaching, the cheering stops. Lyn’s parents are scared and enraged. They call Kristen a monster, and shout at her to leave. Lyn tries to defend her, but her parents pull her away, trying to protect her from what they see as a dangerous creature. Deeply hurt, Kristen runs away out into the street and out of sight. Lyn breaks away from her parents and chases after her. Cut to that evening. Lyn walks back into the house, looking frazzled, without Kristen. She couldn’t find her. She moans about it to her mom, but instead of comforting her they continue to insist that Kristen was a menace and it’s a good thing she left. Lyn still disagrees, and makes a big scene of her frustration with her parents and the world by locking herself in her room. She throws herself on her bed and despondently buries her head in her pillow. Transition to that night. Lyn is in the same position, but sound asleep. Downstairs, Lyn’s parents are washing dishes. They’re discussing what happened that day. Her dad complains about how much it’s going to cost to get that crater filled and the fence fixed. In light of the fact that Lyn didn’t come down for dinner so it was just them (Rose is at a friend’s house), her mom says that maybe they should’ve been a little more comforting towards Lyn after that; her dad replies that for their own safety they couldn’t have risked giving their daughter an opening to manipulate them into letting Kristen come back and stay with them. Back in Lyn’s room, a red light glows through the window over the front of her bed. Cut back to downstairs. The parents are still washing dishes. Suddenly, a loud crash of breaking glass sounds from upstairs, followed by Lyn’s high-pitched scream. They run upstairs to see what’s going on, and they come across a frightening scene- Lyn backed against the footboard of her bed, fatally kicking and pushing back a robot drone. The robot grabs her around the neck, choking out her screams, and pulls her out the window. Her dad runs to try and save her, but he misses grabbing her hand as she’s yanked along. Outside, the drone dangles her in midair by the neck, suffocating her and looking ready to drop her and kill her. She grabs at the claw, trying to pry it off her so she can breathe, and also flails her legs around wildly. She kicks the bottom of it, knocking it off balance and sending down a little. Its grip loosens and she squirms out, falling a few feet and rolling to the ground. She lays curled up on the grass, trying desperately to catch her breath. Her parents burst through the back door and run to her side; they lift her up, hug her, and cry out in relief that she’s okay. Lyn starts coming to again and realizes what’s going on, so she tells her parents to run. They refuse, and suddenly her dad is hit by the robot drone’s swinging arm, which knocks him far to the side. Lyn pushes her mom away and runs the opposite direction, which seems to grab the drone’s attention. She shouts at it, telling it that Kristen wasn’t there. It doesn’t listen. Though instead of searching for Kristen, it focuses all its attention on Lyn, firing up a laser blast. All of a sudden, a rock flies out of nowhere and impacts the side of its head, hard enough to crack the glass over one of the eyes. It turns to where the stone came from- Lyn’s mom, yelling at and threatening it. It re-aims its blast at her and fires. Luckily, her husband recovered for the earlier hit and tackled her out of the way just in time. They fall to the ground. The drone turns back to its original target but, much to it’s dismay, she’s gone. We see that she had snuck over to her parents, and is now helping them up and leading them out of there down the street. They duck behind the house. The drone swivels its head around, but to no avail; it’s lost them. As they run down the street, ducking in cover wherever they could, the family discusses what is happening. They come to the conclusion that the drones must have identified Lyn as a significant threat to their goal of taking down Kristen, so they’re trying to kill her as well. Not only that, but they’re trying to attack them separately so it will be easier to get their targets, which means that there must be another drone going after Kristen. They figure that once the first drone takes Lyn out, it will go to join the second one getting Kristen. Then, Lyn gets an idea. Cut to the robot, who is searching around town. It flies over a fence into a community swimming pool. It scans the surrounding area, then the water- it spots an object. It’s Lyn, floating limp and motionless on her back in the water, eyes blank and unblinking. Running down from her hairline is a drizzle of red liquid that looks like blood. The robot decides that she’s dead, turns around, and moves on. As soon as it’s gone, Lyn springs back to life, paddling back to land and wiping the red stuff- fake blood for theater- off her face. Her parents come out from behind the gates. Her dad questions her about why she was carrying fake blood packets, and she replies that she always does for emergencies. They exit the pool area and start following the robot from a ways behind. They eventually reach the woods, where the two robots meet. They seem t have a silent exchange of information and continue on into the forest. Lyn and her family take this as a sign that Kristen is close, so they head in as well. After a little while of looking (they lost track of the bots so they went off on their own), they come across an odd clearing with a large metallic object with a shape somewhere between an egg and a teardrop; we later learn that it’s Kristen’s space pod. Sitting on the ground beside it is Kristen, hugging her knees, looking utterly disheartened. Leaving her parents behind, Lyn runs out to comfort her. It starts to work, but then her parents come out as well, and Kristen becomes extremely nervous. Lyn convinces her parents to apologize to Kristen and say it was wrong to kick her out like that. She accepts it and regains her composure. Suddenly, a robot bursts out of the woods, guns blazing. They all dive to the ground, except Lyn who dodges to the side, barely being missed by one of the red beams. She looks over her shoulder and sees another robot charging right at her from behind. Kristen sees this, which triggers a transformation sequence into a new alien: a tall, faceless humanoid creatures whose body is plating with asymmetrical pieces of white shell, and has perfectly spherical growths running up and down its arms. It’s Whitewash. Whitewash leaps at Lyn and tackles her out of the way of the drone just in time. They roll over a few times before stopping and rising to her feet. Lyn makes a comment that she has absolutely no clue what this new guy does. Both drones are coming at them now. Whitewash takes the front, and when the first one gets there, she hammers down on the top of it with both fists. It’s cap plate dents in as if it were made of tin foil. It wabbles in midair for a moment, then reaches out and slaps her to the side. She flies a few feet and crashes on the ground on her side. When she gets up, one of the orb growths on her arm pops off and rolls to the floor. Everyone stares at it for a second until, suddenly, a flash of light explodes from it. When the light fades, all the colors around them look inverted. It only takes the humans a few seconds to adjust to the change, but the robots don’t seem to be processing it as well. They begins to fly in random directions and grope around blindly, trying to feel out their prey. One of them starts getting dangerously close to Lyn, who just steps to the side and lets it go past. Her dad makes a comment, asking what was going on. Both robots turn directly at him and start charging. Lyn claps her hands a few times and shouts, making them change direction. As she does so, Whitewash barrels into the side of one of the drones, knocking it away. The sound of crunching metal catches the attention of the other drone. It reaches its hands out and manages to grab her by the shoulders. She grabs it by its shoulders (actually the top of its tube-like arms) as well. It turns into a standstill wrestling match, both of them pushing on each other will equal force. For a second, it looks like the robot is winning, but Lyn picks a rock up off the ground and throws it at it. It turns its head to her, shifting its attention to the new sensory input, and as it does so Whitewash yanks back on the arms, ripping them right off the body. Black fluid (which looks white in the inverse) splatters everywhere. Whitewash finishes the job by grabbing its head and tearing its head off as well. Its body crashes to the ground, totally deactivated. Whitewash looked up, scanning what was going on. The remaining robot, now beaten and deformed by still working, was coming down upon Lyn’s parents who were huddled in fear on the ground. She cries out in surprise and fear in sort of a weird bubbling hiss. The drone turns to her, this time reacting a lot quicker- it raises an arm and fires a laser at her, which hits and sends her flying into a tree. It then turns its focus back to the parents. Just as it raises its arms to smash down on them, it freezes in place. We then see that Lyn had snuck up behind it and jabbed a stick in the crack in the plating between the head and the body. Sparks fly everywhere. The drone drops to the ground, motionless. Lyn and her parents stare at each other in silence, breathing heavily. Whitewash walks over beside Lyn, practically unscathed. Lyn says they better get back home. They get up and leave. They soon exit the field of visual effect that Whitewash created, so everything returns to normal colors. Whitewash also turns back into Kristen soon after. When they arrive home, it’s past midnight. They all sit down in the living room, at first in silence. Then her parents start saying that they’re still not sure if it’s a good idea to let Kristen stay with them, especially with the robots. Lyn and Kristen are both horrified at that idea. Lyn argues that she’s now a target for the robot drones and the might be as well, and that Kristen was the only one who could defend them. Also she pointed out that Kristen needed help too, and it would be cruel to just leave her on her own. They don’t seem convinced, admitting that they didn’t want some sort of shapeshifting creature who can’t even speak English living with them; she could be trying to kill them for all they know. The room falls into silence again, and suddenly Kristen looks directly at both of them and, with some difficulty, says the words: “I’m sorry.” The parents are caught totally off guard. Lyn looks up at them with big, pleading eyes. Eventually they give in and say that she can stay. Lyn and Kristen jump out of their seats in excitement, cheering and laughing happily in celebration. Her parents can’t help but smile. Lyn asks how they’re going to break this to Rose. Her mom says they’ll just tell her, and if she doesn’t believe them she’s find out soon enough. Her dad says that it’s getting late and they should all hit the hay; Kristen can stay in the guest room, and Lyn can skip school tomorrow. Ecstatic, Lyn brings Kristen upstairs and out of sight to show her her new room. Once she’s gone, her mom asks her dad whether this is really a good idea. He says that he doesn’t know whether it was a good or bad idea, but either way things would be a lot more exciting than they were before. We see one more shot of the house before the screen fades to black. Appearances Characters *Lyn Augustine *Kristen (Pi) *John Augustine *Maria Augustine *Rose Augustine Aliens Used *Pulscal *Whitewash Villains *Robot Drones (2 waves) Key Events *John, Maria, and Rose Augustine are introduced. *Lyn's family find out about Kristen's secret. *Lyn learns that Pi's name is really Kristen. *Pulscal and Whitewash are used for the first time. Category:Episodes Category:KrisTen Episodes Category:Binkatong